What’s Missing from Woody Allen’s Paris

Back in the nineteen-seventies, there was a brief flurry about a novel called “Time and Again,” by Jack Finney, in which the protagonist was able to project himself from 1970 back into the New York of 1882 by a kind of self-hypnosis, based largely on the power of his surroundings, which happened to be the Dakota apartments on Central Park West. (The Dakota wasn’t built until 1884, but let’s chalk that one up to artistic license.) So potent was the atmosphere of the Dakota that the main character, a man named Simon Morley, needed only to sit in his apartment and feel its architecture intensely to find himself thrust back to the age when the building was new. I liked the book not because it was a good novel—it wasn’t—but because I lived in the Dakota for a few years in the late seventies, and the book’s conceit was impossible to resist.

I thought of “Time and Again” when I saw Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” which is based on much the same conceit: the notion that if architectural surroundings are compelling enough, and you love them enough, they can bring you back to another time. In the Allen movie the man doing the time travel is an earnest young screenwriter who is awed by the artists and writers who gathered in Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, and who sees in them a purity of artistic purpose that is missing from his own life as a Hollywood hack. A small, narrow street in Paris where there is no sign of anything having changed since the twenties serves the purpose of the Dakota, as the platform from which Gil Pender, the writer, makes his nightly journey into the past, although in this case he is propelled less by a fondness for this particular street as by a love of Paris itself.

It’s a love that Allen, who is far more sentimental about buildings and places than he is about people, clearly shares. His vision of Paris isn’t perceptive. It’s charming, and intentionally naïve. In Allen’s film, the city is all beautiful surfaces, and so are the writers, artists, and musicians who made it what it was in the nineteen-twenties. There’s no edge to it whatsoever. And there is so little of the twenty-first century in it that you wonder why Gil Pender had to travel back in time at all—Allen’s Paris of today is nearly as free of unpleasant sights as the city he went back to. They’re both products of Allen’s imagination.

The film also reminded me of the time a few years ago when Allen, then living on East Ninety-second Street, helped a coalition of neighbors fight an apartment tower planned for Madison Avenue by making a short video about his neighborhood. In Allen’s video, the Carnegie Hill area of Manhattan was pure and perfect, an idyllic quarter with elegant houses, beautiful shops, and clean streets, all of which would be in jeopardy if the tower were to be built. The fact that there were other tall apartment buildings around already wasn’t mentioned, and, just as the buildings that have changed Paris in the last generation never appear in “Midnight in Paris,” none of these high-rises ever appeared in Allen’s video. (Eventually, the Madison Avenue building did go up, but in a shorter, redesigned form, so Allen’s effort was not a total failure.)

I’m the last person to argue against anyone’s love of New York, Paris, or any other city, and Woody Allen is certainly entitled to see it as charmingly as he wants. And Allen is smart enough to include a few lines that we might call sweetness disclaimers, in particular one in which a character says, “Nostalgia is denial of painful present.” But all presents are painful, and all pasts alluring; there’s nothing new to that observation. What makes Allen’s view of Paris so unconvincing is that it’s so flat and one-dimensional: it isn’t a city, it’s a stage set. And it’s a place in which the greatest gift that the architecture of the past can give us, the gift of a richer present, is implicitly devalued, because it’s seen mainly as a vehicle to help escape from the present.

Paris as it exists, warts and all, is much more interesting than the Paris of Woody Allen’s mind. It isn’t as consistently beautiful, but heaven knows it’s beautiful enough, and it’s a place in which, as Lewis Mumford once said of the city, time becomes visible. You see and feel layers of time, including our own, in Paris, whereas Allen wants to strip the layers away, and leaves something much thinner.

He also doesn’t acknowledge that the artists and writers Gil goes back to meet—Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Fitzgerald, Dali—were trying very hard to upset the very status quo that Gil so seems to worship. They were radicals, not cartoon characters. It’s true that their changes were cultural, not physical. They weren’t trying to alter the physical appearance of Paris. But maybe that’s why Allen made sure that Le Corbusier wasn’t among the artistic figures from the twenties whom Gil Pender meets. Le Corbusier sought to do with modern architecture what Gertrude Stein was trying to do with modern language, and Picasso with modern painting: bring about a revolution, which in his case would have meant tearing the old Paris down and replacing it with stark towers. I can’t imagine how Woody Allen deals with the fact that Le Corbusier was a part of the same energetic, modernist Parisian culture as Picasso and Gertrude Stein, in which nothing was lower on the scale of values than sentimentality.

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